Adam tried hard to get out of the holiday, but Anne wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“We’re still friends, aren’t we?” she said. “Please don’t tell me we’re not friends now.”
He knew what he had to say. “We’re more than friends. We’re family. I haven’t forgotten that.”
Post a comment »
Schleich, the German company that mostly manufactures plastic animals—horses, goats, pigs, ostriches—also makes a ghost. It stands about three inches tall, is white-painted, besheeted, drags behind it a black-painted ball and chain. The two implied hands are raised to head level, and its mouth is open in the silent whooo of a wail.
My son, Jim, saw it in the local toy shop, wanted it and got it—I was, I’ll admit, the parent who gave in.
Jim held the ghost all the way home, with me pushing him in the McLaren buggy. We went through the park. It was autumn, and the trees had circular skirts of fallen leaves.
Everyone staying at the refugee reception centre has two stories—the real one and the one for the record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them. Two days ago a new Iraqi refugee arrived in Malmö in southern Sweden. They took him to the reception centre and did some medical tests. Then they gave him a room, a bed, a towel, a bedsheet, a bar of soap, a knife, fork and spoon, and a cooking pot. Today the man is sitting in front of the immigration officer telling his story at amazing speed, while the immigration officer asks him to slow down as much as possible.
***
They told me they had sold me to another group and they were very cheerful. They stayed up all night drinking whisky and laughing. They even invited me to join them in a drink but I declined and told them I was a religious man. They bought me new clothes, and that night they cooked me a chicken and served me fruit and sweets. It seems I fetched a good price. The leader of the group even shed real tears when he said goodbye. He embraced me like a brother. “You’re a very good man. I wish you all the best, and good luck in your life,” said the man with one eye.
I think I stayed with the first group just three months. They had kidnapped me on that cold accursed night. That was in the early winter of 2006. We had orders to go to the Tigris and it was the first time we had received instructions directly from the head of the emergency department in the hospital. At the bank of the river the policemen were standing around six headless bodies. The heads had been put in an empty flour sack in front of the bodies. The police guessed they were the bodies of some clerics. We had arrived late because of the heavy rain. The police piled the bodies onto the ambulance driven by my colleague Abu Salim and I carried the sack of heads to my ambulance. We set off along Abu Nawas Street towards Rashid Street, driving at medium speed because of the rain. I remembered the words the director of the emergency department in the hospital often used to say: “When you’re carrying an injured person or a patient close to death, the speed of the ambulance shows how humane and responsible you are.” But when you are carrying severed heads in an ambulance, you needn’t go faster than a hearse drawn by mules in a dark medieval forest.
The director saw himself as a philosopher and an artist, but “born in the wrong country” as he would say. He took his work seriously nonetheless and considered running the ambulance section of the emergency department a sacred duty. We called him the Professor and my other colleagues hated him and called him mad. But I retained much respect and affection for him because of the beautiful and fascinating things he said. Once he said to me: “Spilt blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.” He would usually wrap up his speeches by pointing to the sky and declaiming theatrically: “The question of humanity can be solved only by constant dread.”
Blame it on the Olympics. The authorities are trying to clean up the city, give it a new face. Let’s fool tourists and athletes into thinking it’s always been like this. Street performers of all kinds, they’re swept out of sight. Not that they vanish, they relocate to the outskirts, beyond the Fifth Ring Road. Now, as I set out to my work, making for the No 13 subway line, I’m importuned by calligraphers and contortionists, fortune tellers and acrobats, and a living statue in the guise of a terracotta warrior poses on the traffic island. You can’t just walk by these people as if they don’t exist.
There’s one busker who’s been here since the new year. He’s staked out a spot in the underpass near the station. In his late fifties, I’d guess; gray hair and glasses; on colder days he wears a Tianjin-style ribbed jacket. Just another migrant from the provinces, I’d supposed, chancing his luck. He arranges an inflatable red cushion on the ground and sits crosslegged, the instrument balanced on his left thigh. He plays the erhu, always the same slow, mournful tune. I must have tipped him a dozen times before we finally had a conversation. “Tough out there,” I said—words to that effect. It was April—dust season; the north wind blowing from beyond the Great Wall. “Not so bad,” he replied seriously, “I get bigger tips in lousy weather.” To my surprise he was addressing me in Beijing dialect—throaty, with exaggerated tones, the way the old-timers speak. I had some minutes to spare, and was in no hurry to go out into the billowing dust. “How was spring in the old days?” I said, “More dusty? Less?” He drew the bow against the strings and the python-skin resonator amplified the sound. I dropped a five yuan bill in the instrument case. Once again he performed his tune for me, and then he told me his story.
***
His name was Chen Wei. His father had taught composition at the Beijing Conservatory and his mother’s father had owned a department store; during the cultural revolution the family was in Category 4, the lowest level. In 1970 Chen was sent to be re-educated at a commune in Shanxi province. “It was hell,” he said. “We were supposed to ‘learn from the peasants,’ but you can’t learn anything when you’re hungry all the time. We could never fulfil our quotas. We intellectuals were told to hoe the weeds, but nobody told us what was a weed and what was a sprout.”
“Did your comrades help each other?”
You’re something else. You really are.
This is the kind of thing you’d do. Say you were standing outside a music shop. You’d go into that shop and just buy an accordion. You’d buy one that cost hundreds of pounds, one of the really big ones. It would be huge. It would be a pretty substantial thing just to lift or to carry across a room, never mind actually play.
You would buy this accordion precisely because you can’t play the accordion.
My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter’s keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem—perhaps the best I’d ever written. When I woke, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.
“What time is it?”
“Hello, Son,” he said in Vietnamese. “I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened.”
Lottie announced that she was getting married. This was at the breakfast table at her parents’ house one weekend. The kitchen in that house was upstairs, its windows overlooking the garden. It was a tall, thin, old house, comfortably untidy. The summer morning was rainy, so all the lights were on, the atmosphere close and dreamy, perfumed with toast and coffee.
“Whatever for?” said Lottie’s mother, Hattie, and carried on reading her book. She was an English teacher, but she read crime novels at weekends: this one was about a detective in Venice.
Lottie was nineteen, but she looked more like thirteen or fourteen, just over five feet tall, with a tight little figure and a barrel chest. She insisted on wearing the same glasses with thick black frames that she had chosen years earlier, and her hair, the colour of washed-out straw, was pulled into pigtails.
Nice car,” said Nick’s brother Ed, as they put the bags in the boot at the airport. Nick looked up at him, wondering if Ed meant anything more than this, and then decided that he did not. He would have to try not to be so touchy. They had not seen each other for nearly two years and his brother was simply making an effort. After all, it was a nice car, a black four-wheel drive Toyota, but hardly ostentatious. It was the first substantial thing Nick had bought when he and Beth had moved to the US eighteen months before, and he could not pretend he did not enjoy sitting up high behind the wheel, driving the wide sunny streets on the way to work every day.
“Big,” said his brother.
“Well,” said Nick, starting the engine, “we have the baby now. And anyway, everything’s big out here, you’ll see.” He pinched his belly and grinned at Rosie, Ed’s wife, sitting in the back. “Even me.”
A set of unfortunate circumstances had led Adam to this point. In the normal course of things he wouldn’t have been here at all, but his life hadn’t been normal for a while. Everything had unravelled for him a few months before when two things happened at the same time to undo him. First he’d lost his job and then he’d lost his house.
He shouldn’t have been surprised about the job. All the signs were there, but Adam was oblivious, and it was a deep, cold shock to discover that the young black intern he’d been training for the past six months was, in fact, being groomed to replace him. His boss had been apologetic, talking about racial quotas and telling him it was nothing personal. But how could it not be personal? It was he, nobody else, who had to pack up his desk and take his pictures off the wall and walk through the door for the last time. Afterwards, remembering this scene, what he felt most keenly was humiliation that he hadn’t seen it coming.
The house was a different story. It had been clear for a long time how things were going. The area of Johannesburg in which he’d bought—trendy and vibrant and multicultural when he’d first moved in—had been sliding badly for a few years. All his friends who lived nearby had been selling up and getting out, and they’d urged Adam to do the same. But for some reason, some passivity in his character, he hadn’t done anything about it. He’d just sat there, watching it all go to pieces: the gangsters taking over, the squatters moving in, the crime and drugs getting worse and worse, until it was too late. He couldn’t find anybody reliable to rent the house and nobody wanted to buy it. In the end he couldn’t even give the place away. The bank didn’t want to repossess it and they only took it when they saw that Adam was in no position to keep up any repayments at all.
Discuss this article and read more about the competition at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
First Prize
Heat
by Caitlin Hart, St Paul’s Girls’ School
Sophia lies almost entirely still under the weight of the heat as it settles over her, pressing into the dips and grooves of her body. Thick air tickles her parched throat and tongue; sweat clings to her hair and slithers down between her breasts, catching in the dip of her collarbone. She feels herself slowly being smothered to death. When Peter comes back out of the bathroom the first impression she has of him is perfect teeth, gleaming in the light from the open window.
Get the best value — subscribe and receive Prospect every month.
Is it ever right to take the law into your own hands?
Labour must master the art of political apology
Sex explains Nicholas Sarkozy's mysterious power
Even America is investing in high-speed rail. It's time Britain did the same, says the transport minister
In 2004, the one political system still functioning in Iraq was the tribes
